State v. Meza

50 P.3d 407, 203 Ariz. 50
CourtCourt of Appeals of Arizona
DecidedAugust 15, 2002
Docket1 CA-CR 00-0792
StatusPublished
Cited by23 cases

This text of 50 P.3d 407 (State v. Meza) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Arizona primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Meza, 50 P.3d 407, 203 Ariz. 50 (Ark. Ct. App. 2002).

Opinions

OPINION

FIDEL, Judge.

¶ 1 The State appeals from the trial court’s order precluding the use of breath test results in a trial against appellee/cross appellant Ricardo Dominic Meza. The trial court ordered preclusion of that evidence as a sanction against the State for various discov[52]*52ery violations. Meza cross-appeals, claiming that the violations were so egregious that the trial court should have dismissed the charges with prejudice.

Background

A. The Arrest

¶ 2 On May 16, 1997, Ricardo Meza drove his ear into the back of a motorcycle, seriously injuring the motorcyclist. Police officers at the scene noted a moderate to strong smell of alcohol on Meza’s breath; his eyes were bloodshot and watery; and, during field sobriety tests, after showing several cues of impairment, Meza announced that he could not continue one of the tests “[b]ecause I’m unpaired.” Meza was arrested and transported to a nearby DUI van, where Officer Campbell administered two breath tests using Intoxilyzer 5000 unit #2806. The first test registered an alcohol concentration of .160 percent, the second .159 percent. A grand jury subsequently indicted Meza on one count of aggravated assault involving the use of a dangerous instrument.

B. Meza’s Discovery Effort

¶ 3 Shortly after pleading not guilty, Meza filed a motion for discovery. There followed a long series of motions to supplement discovery, motions to compel discovery, and motions to suppress evidence and dismiss charges for lack of discovery. Among other items, Meza sought all calibration checks and standard quality assurance procedure (“SQAP”) tests performed on Intoxilyzer 5000 unit # 2806 during the one-month periods preceding and following his arrest.

¶ 4 During regularly performed calibration checks and SQAP tests, crime lab technicians run sample tests on the machines using a standard solution containing an alcohol concentration of .100. An Intoxilyzer machine functions properly if it assesses a standard .100 solution at between .090 and .110. In-toxilyzer test results are meant to be stored in the Alcohol Data Acquisition Management System (“ADAMS”) database and then downloaded into the Arizona Criminal Justice Information System (“ACJIS”) for dissemination to prosecutors, defense attorneys, and others. Every calibration check is to be recorded on a paper form known as “Exhibit P,” and every SQAP test is to be recorded on a paper form known as “Exhibit Q.”

¶ 5 At a hearing on April 27, 1998, Clark McDonough, the criminalist in charge of maintaining the Phoenix Crime Lab’s breath testing program, testified that “all calibration checks and function accuracy checks that we perform are put down on forms P and Q” and that “[t]here is no way to perform the tests and not have it on the ADAMS system.” He also testified that, to his knowledge, there was no way to delete such tests from the memory, a statement he reiterated several months later. Indeed, to underscore the point at the first hearing, the prosecutor asked, “And you, personally, as a person who does those calibration tests, you don’t intentionally try to delete any information, do you?” McDonough answered, “No. No, I do not.”1

¶ 6 In a subsequent motion to clarify discovery issues, the State asserted that it had “either supplied the requested information or the information is irrelevant and the Defense is on a fishing expedition or no such information exists.” Rejecting that assertion, the trial court “determin[ed] that the discovery request by the Defense [was] valid,” granted the motion to compel, and, with several specified exceptions, ordered production by June 15,1998.

¶ 7 Meza, dissatisfied with the disclosure that followed, filed motions for supplemental discovery in July 1998, including a request for all ADAMS records from unit #2806 from January 1, 1997, until the date of the request. The State responded that it had “either supplied the requested information or no such documents exist[ ].” After a series of further motions to compel, motions for sanctions, and motions to dismiss, the trial court observed at a hearing on December 21,1998, that the Crime Lab’s approach to its disclosure obligations had been “flat unacceptable” [53]*53and that the court was “not going to tolerate any more.” Ordering the State to produce all ADAMS retrieval records by noon on December 24, the court added, “In the event ... that all records are not produced for the subject machine during the subject time period, this Court will dismiss this matter and the only issue will be whether this dismissal will be with or without prejudice.”

¶ 8 As trial approached, the Phoenix Crime Lab’s account of its record-keeping practices began to change. McDonough had testified in April 1998 that all tests on the machines were recorded and that there was no way to delete such tests from memory. But Mc-Donough left the Crime Lab; and at an evidentiary hearing on May 5, 1999, one month before trial, Jesse Shriki, McDon-ough’s replacement, testified that by employing a certain code, a criminalist testing a machine could prevent the test from being recorded in the ADAMS memory, and that he had done so himself in past instances of “experimental testing.” No written policy established this procedure. Nor, as the evidence soon showed, were such anticipatory deletions limited to experimental testing.

¶ 9 Shortly after that hearing, Meza’s counsel received a copy of a memo in which Terry Hogan, a Department of Public Safe-tyemployee, asked a colleague whether he should “delete” a calibration cheek. The Ya-vapai County Attorney’s Office had disclosed the memo to an attorney in Sedona in an unrelated case, who then passed it on to Meza’s counsel. On the basis of this new evidence suggesting that calibration checks could be deleted, Meza filed a motion to preclude introduction of his breath test results at trial. At a hearing on the motion, Shriki testified that a quality assurance specialist performing a calibration check could prevent the results of that check from entering ACJIS if, in the opinion of that specialist, “they do not reflect the operating condition of the instrument.” The purpose of this practice, he stated, was to prevent test results perceived as invalid from becoming accessible to defense experts and from being inappropriately used to discredit the machines and their results. Shriki told the court, however, that there should be ADAMS records for all calibration checks run on a particular machine, whether or not the results of those checks were downloaded into ACJIS.

¶ 10 At the conclusion of the hearing, the court denied Meza’s motion to preclude the breath test. An essential basis for the court’s decision was that, according to the ADAMS data on unit # 2806, “[tjhere were no failed calibration tests in the period between May 14th and May 29th.” Although, according to the court, there might have been prejudice if evidence of failed calibration tests had been withheld, here “all calibration tests indicated that the instrument was working properly. All experts have said, assuming that the instrument was working properly on May 14th, assuming that it was working properly on May 29th and May 30th, both of which were before and after the subject test, a ... reasonable scientific assumption, is that the machine was working properly on the date in question.” It followed, the court concluded, that Meza could not show prejudice from the lack of disclosure.

C. The Trial

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Bluebook (online)
50 P.3d 407, 203 Ariz. 50, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-meza-arizctapp-2002.